Before we can provide corrective emotional experiences for each other, we must learn how to tend to our own immature parts, to our own reactivity, to our avoidance, our long-suffering frustration. We must master the art of relational mindfulness and retake the reins.

In your close relationships, urgency is your enemy, and breath is your friend.

The great spiritual teacher Jiddu Krishnamurti once said that true liberation is freedom from our own automatic responses. In our culture, our relationship to relationships tends to be passive. We get what we get, and then we react to it. Most of us try to get more of what we want from our partners by complaining when they don’t get it right.

Adaptive Child fixers are fueled by an anxious, driven need to take anyone’s tension away from them as quickly as possible. Their motto is “I’m upset until you’re not.”

As a couples therapist, I have three sources of information: what the partners report about themselves and each other, how they behave in front of me, and how I feel witnessing their behavior.

Now just because the Adaptive Child part of you is rigid does not mean it is always outwardly aggressive. You can have an overly accommodating, people-pleasing Adaptive Child. Your Adaptive Child can tend toward superiority, it can tend toward inferiority, or it can bounce back and forth. But whether it’s more dominating or withdrawn, it will react

There is no redeeming value whatsoever in harshness. Harshness does nothing that loving firmness doesn’t do better.

But most of us do not reenact the experience of the trauma itself. Instead, we act out the coping strategy that we evolved to deal with it.

The central question I ask myself during a therapy session is simply this one: Which part of you am I talking to? Am I talking to the mature part of you, the one who’s present in the here and now? This is the part I call the Wise Adult. That’s the part that cares about us. Or am I speaking to a triggered part of you, to your adversarial you and me